Aunts, uncles, and cousins – it’s time for comments about their parents, my grandparents, and a great-grandmother as well. It seems strange to me that I, myself, at the present, have nine great-grandchildren: Claire and Charlotte; Brantley and Shiloh; Elijah, Lila Rose and Liam; and Kipton. Even though they live close-by, I have seen them only at significant family gatherings. I’d like to blame this on the COVID-year. It is certainly not a lack of interest and desire causing us not to visit one another.
As for my own great-grandparents, I have no direct remembrance of any of them. There is a blurred photograph of me with Babush, my mother’s grandmother, Annie Sluchalis Olupkwicz, who was born in Poland in 1860, the time of the US Civil War! Except for a genealogical search, I would not know her name; I heard references only to Babush. The word is Polish for “grandma.” The designation probably comes from babuska, the head scarf worn by elderly Polish women.
My maternal grandmother was Rose Olupkwicz (1891- 1950). However, the Americanized name she used was Ulip, or some variation of this spelling. Since immigration agents often could not spell European names, especially those from Central Europe, they assigned new ones which might have a few sounds heard in the original language. Her husband was William Moransky, although a copy of my mother’s baptismal record suggests the original form was “Viktor Murawski.” Family legend reports that the agent wanted him to be “Moran,” but my grandfather insisted it must remain Polish. He was willing to accept the Irish name with a Polish ending. I suppose his first name, Wicktor, is why my mother was named “Victoria” and her oldest brother was “William,” although the transformation from Wicktor to William does take a leap of faith!
I personally have no real memories of Grandfather William, who died in 1945, when I was ten years old. This realization causes me to wonder if Brantley and Claire will have anything beyond a few photographs as the major part of their recollections of me. I’m pleased I have those of Grandfather William, whose name I took on, when I was confirmed a few years later.
It’s possible that Grandfather William was a coalminer in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, where he arrived, after leaving Poland sometime around 1900. Family stories suggest he came from Warsaw or Krakow, although genealogical searches report in was born in Zuweleki, Poland. He became a farmer when he and Rose moved to Ohio, sometime before 1913, since my Uncle Bill was born in Girard, rather than in Ambridge, where the older daughters were born.
I’ve described how, during the time I lived on her farm, I helped my grandmother Rose, by reading her recipes to her each day before she went to work as a cook at a local factory. Her spoken English was fluent, even though she could not read it. I remember how well dressed she was before going to church or on other visits. I also recall that she enjoyed whiskey. My mother, however, believing that her mother was an alcoholic, refused to drink cocktails, beer or wine. This may have been helpful to me in that I never tasted alcohol while growing up. On the other hand, I may have inherited the need for my gallbladder surgery from both of them! My grandmother’s occurred in the “dark ages” and I remember she had some sort of drainage bag during her final years. My Grandmother Moransky died in 1950, at age 59. I was fifteen. Does this suggest that if I live to 2030 (age 95!), Brantley and Claire may remember me!?
Name-wise, my father’s parents made out somewhat better at Ellis Island than my mother’s parents did. Evidently, Italian surnames were easier to spell phonetically than were those from Poland and other Slavic countries. My grandfather retained “Camerino,” my grandmother continued, until marriage, as “Russo.” However, first names were still a challenge. Luigi became “Lewis” rather than “Louis.” I’ve always wondered if the agent at Ellis Island was Welsh. My grandmother’s Italian name of Dolgizia (or Dulcizzia) was Anglicized into “Dorothy.” I suppose that transformation from the initial sound of “dull” to that of “dor” is equal to that from “wick” to “will” back in the early 1900’s.
My grandfather Luigi/Lewis was a painter-paperhanger all of his life, prior to becoming an urban farmer. Although the exterior of homes, back then, was painted (with two coats of outdoor paint), interior rooms were decorated with wallpaper rather than being painted. Enamel was used only for doorways and moldings around the upper edge of the walls, which were “hung” with rolls of paper having floral prints. As a young child I had fun when I occasionally helped to clean up scraps of wallpaper while avoiding the paste which was used to adhere the paper to the walls. Scrapping and tearing the old paper from the walls before the new wallpaper was applied was even more fun.
When grandpa Luigi retired, leaving the business to Uncle Joe, he worked long hours in the gardens surrounding the house “up-the-hill.” He sold his excess produce from a stand on the front lawn. His major offerings included tomatoes, corn, string beans and zucchini (also known as cucuzza and pronounced “cucutz.”) My grandmother, of course, supervised the canning of most of his crop. My favorite from the garden was fried peppers loaded onto fresh baked bread. The bread came from outdoor ovens when they lived on Vienna Avenue and from an indoor, cast-iron oven “up-the-hill.” I preferred the brick oven outside, even more so for my grandmother’s pizza.
If my lack of interest in drinking beer and wine is a result of the stories about my mother’s mother, and the medical fact that both of them had gallbladder problems, I should probably mention that my father’s mother had diabetes and Uncle Joe would administer her insulin, daily. Fortunately, therapy has improved tremendously over the last decade; I use my own epi-pen on a daily basis with minimal fuss.
In contrast to grandmother Moransky, grandmother Camerino never owned a fancy dress. She always wore a housedress made many years ago from floral-designed material. She always wore a half-apron around her waist. The two also differed in their use of English. I never heard a word of English come from my Grandmother Camerino. I knew she understood English, since she seemed to know what I said to her, but she refused to speak a word of it. On the other hand, I have mental images of my Grandfather Camerino reading the newspaper as he sat at the kitchen table drinking a mug of coffee.
As I’ve stated in other remembrances, Italian was the primary language spoken around the table during both dinner and card-playing “up-the-hill.” When I was young, I could make out some of what was being said, but never learned the language. On occasion my father would take great delight in one set of words with vastly different meanings in Italian and Polish. The word struny in Polish means “strings.” Although there is another word for string beans in Polish, the colloquial word was pronounced as “struntz.” The Italian heard this sound as a “piece of shit!” My father took great delight in the observation that my Polish relatives ate struntz.